Paul Diddy: Spectral Alphabet, Finissage

About

Diddy's diverse artistic practice, which is inspired by the frenetic sampling of hip-hop culture--encompasses collage, painting, drawing, film and sound work. Diddy uses this disparate array of mediums to explore paradoxical questions about mysticism, time, and space. His artistic process often involves posing material challenges that change according to medium. His lushly colored collages--which alternate between ethereal visual poems and densely-layered, hallucinatory dreamscapes like the 3.5 meter long work time is a circle--are largely comprised of vintage lithographic images from found books. extra nomenclature, a drawing comprised of miniscule marks made from dollar store markers, was the result of a challenge the artist gave himself to visually depict the Russian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky's conceptualization of the 4th dimension. The dialectic of control and transcendence is central to Diddy's process and finds its greatest expression in cosmos, the third painting in his triptych it is not far. Painted over the course of 18 months in 3 different cities, the tangled web of neon lines demands a participatory observational mode. While the act of painting this work was both time consuming and physically punishing, the dogged restraint inherent in its process quickly transforms into a disorienting and intoxicating optical experience. Spectral Alphabet will present four distinct, yet interrelated bodies of work: the triptych it is not far, which explores the concept of eternity through symbols of the mythic shamanic past, the coded possibilities of the present and the disembodied abstract future; the stop motion super-8 film telos; large and small scale collages; and the sound works cultivated incompetence, elaborate, and trance send dental, which will also be available for download at www.pauldiddy.com. Paul Diddy was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin in 1982 and was called Paul Mitchell Tyree-Francis for the first 22 years of his life. His work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City and Germany. Diddy's radio program Star Child is regularly broadcast on Dublab, an experimental web radio collective based in Los Angeles. Paul Diddy lives and works in Berlin.